Monday, January 16, 2017

Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson

The year my mother
started hearing voices from her dead brother Clyde, my father moved my own
brother and me from our SweetGrove land in Tennessee to Brooklyn.It was the summer of 1973 and I was eight
years old, my younger brother four, his thumb newly moving to his mouth in the
hot city, his eyes wide and frightened.

To say that Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Another Brooklyn is poetic is not simply a nod to the beauty of her
language, but a realization that the novel is structured around short prose
flashes – rarely even a full page long, often a single line.These slowly construct a story about 4 girls
growing up in the Bed Stuy of the 1970s, with a heavy emphasis on how
friendship – especially among girls – was necessary for survival.

There are glimpses of life in Tennessee, of the aftermath of
the Vietnam War and of the importance of the Nation of Islam to that
community.There are brief scenes that
build a narrative, but only the narrator, August, becomes a full-fledged
character.Her father and mother appear intermittently,
but more as images than characters, while her brother and her three friends, Sylvia,
Angela and Gigi come across more as forces for good, sources of strength than as
people.Everyone is beautiful, even the
junkies and rapists that appear regularly on the periphery of Auggie’s life.

There is a good deal of music.The birth of rap makes a ripple in the lives
of these girls, but they are more interested in r&b and at least Auggie slowly comes to love
jazz. Jazz becomes a symbol for the ability to improvise and survive and the novel's structure is meant to nod to jazz's structure. That structure is careful
and impressive – looking back over the opening pages made clear how neatly subsequent
surprises had been built.

While there is a good deal of tragedy here, ultimately this is a story of survival and I was
compelled to keep reading to learn how Auggie survives; in fact, I was much
more moved by her survival than by the tragedies that befall other characters.